Het HEM’s building has been closed for too long – and we haven’t organised an Open Studio in years. It's about time that we open our doors on the wonderful works - and works in progress - of four of Het HEM's studio artists. Taking place in the Grey Space and in the studios of artists Benjamin Francis, Mint Park, Bonnie Ogilvie and Iriée Zamblé, Open Studio Expo #4 didn’t start out as a group show but somehow turned into one. When we took the works down into the Grey Space, a portrait of the artists as individuals and as a collective emerged.
Open Studio Expo #4 is about the merging of traditions, the reconstruction and reappropriation of some of our most ancient rituals and relationships. It’s about family ties that are strengthened not by blood, but by proximity, necessity and choice. It’s about what happens when you are temporarily situated in a place together.
Enter the space and you will immediately notice a constellation of shifting sightlines. “Open Studio #4” takes its visual language from the tartan patterns Bonnie Ogilvie prints onto her silks. It uses the grid created by the columns in the Grey Space to weave a portrait of four artists who have come together by chance as studio artists at Het HEM and whose work has a layered synergy that takes a new form in this installation.
In the Grey Space, aunties – always dressed to the nines – preside over their broods at a Sunday party. Tartan, the pattern language used to signify familial and clan relations, is repurposed as a methodology for mapping a life as a social fabric. In a nondescript morgue, a family of a different kind prepares two bodies (presented as sculptural objects) in a ritual of washing away the remnants of a previous life. Through this all, a sonic installation envelops the space in the barely perceptible processes of chaotic decay.
Beams of refracted light glisten on the floor in front of Iriée Zamblé’s series Auntie Era and bounce off Francis’ sculptural installations Deathbed and Zero. At some invisible spot in the room, the echoes of Francis’ video work Am I, An Object will give way to the infrasonic soundscape of Mint Park’s Sensing Boundary Layers of Unknown. Meanwhile, your view is filled with billowing silk until a breeze knocks Ogilvie’s silks aside to reveal Zamblé’s diptych Lovers rock. Allow the space to guide your eyes and ears; weave yourself into this fleeting pattern. For this moment, you’re part of the family.
